11 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 61.6 ms ] thread
It looks great. I have not read it to completion just yet, but merely scrolling through the document leaves me with a feeling that the author got tired and decided "this is a good stopping point."

To be fair, writing a book about Emacs is a Sisyphean effort by definition - this sea is a bottomless abyss of hackery abundance, and any meaningful effort to explain it is worth a celebration.

> the author got tired and decided "this is a good stopping point."

Or the deadline was closing in, as this is a university thesis ;)

Correct. The thesis is worth 10 weeks of full-time work by someone on their third study year.
Love to see that Emacs can still capture the atention of new CS students.
Emacs is like a hackers' playground. It's an editor, it has a Lisp, networking support, tools, IRC, Email, Usenet and more by default, a PDF reader, a calculator (with gnuplot support it has graphs), a doc generating platform, an agenda, a silly chatbot...
One of the oldest open source projects in the existence?

It makes building custom UI workflows so easy, I think it’s both obvious and flies under the radar.

With Emacs widgets and some settings at init.el (for speed) you can almost create a grude GUI for something with all the power of Elisp (and disabling nearly all keybdings OFC).
This is great! You should make a web version or add it to the wiki.

I started the Hacker's guide on the emacs wiki many years back. I think this doc was much needed.